You know how these Mets can show they’re different from Mets team that went down and stayed down in other lost baseball Septembers? Win this week from the Cubs and the Marlins. Win their way into a wild card slot in the National League and not back into one. Though you have to say, backing in would be appropriate after the way they threw their season into reverse three weeks ago.
We kept hearing that the schedule might bail out the Mets the last weekend of the regular season because they finish against the Marlins. Guess what? You know who probably think they have an easy time of it to close out their season? The Miami Marlins. You know why? Because they’ve seen what everybody has been seeing from the Mets since mid-June.
There is no such thing as a soft touch for the Mets the way they’ve been playing. Just when they show up and dramatically salvage a game against the Rangers and then take two of three from a Padres team, they go down again, this time against the Nationals. Just like that, their playoff destiny was out of their hands and into the hands Terry Francona’s team from Cincinnati.
Now the Mets have got three against the Cubs and then three more against the Marlins. The Cubs have a better team than the Mets. The Mets right now are only four games better than the Marlins, 80-76 against 76-80. So the Mets are a good week from making the playoffs. And a real bad week from ending up maybe getting passed by the Marlins.
We put ourselves in this position, so we’ve got to find a way to get out of it,” Francisco Lindor said. “And that comes down to winning.”
Nothing has changed. The Mets either figure it out before it’s too late, or this season goes down with the greatest – and most embarrassing – failures in the team’s history. Which, as Mets fans know, is saying plenty. If they are as good as they clearly still think they are, if they remember how to do it the way they did it over the second half of last season and then into October, they’re supposed to do it now. Show up now.
It figures that it might come down to them against the Marlins, whatever happens in Chicago over the next couple of days. It sure was Mets against the Marlins on the last day of the 2007 season, when the Mets were putting the final touches on a collapse that saw them blow a 7-game lead to the Phillies across the last 17 days of the season. It was, you should know, a season during which the Mets had spent 140 days in first place.
They gave the ball to Tom Glavine that day. It was 7-0 by the time the top of the first was over. They had rolled that kind of seven to cap off blowing that 7-game lead. The final score was 8-1 for the Marlins. Mets finished second in the East and missed the playoffs.
They came right back and led the Phillies for most of the ’08 season. Once again, the final game was against the Marlins. Once again the Marlins beat them, on the occasion of the last Mets season at old Shea Stadium, and the Brewers beat those Mets out of a wild card spot. Demolition of Shea began during the winter. Mets fans knew better. The real demolition had begun across another lost September.
The ’07 Mets finished 88-74. The ’08 Mets finished 89-73. Despite being 45-24 and still in first place on June 12, the ’25 Mets won’t win that many games. Going into the Cubs series, they are 17 games under .500 since that highwater mark in June. We keep hearing, in a woe-is-us way, that they’ve used 46 pitchers this season and how that is a major league record. But it’s not just injuries. Another thing to maybe think about is what a small percentage of the 46 were any good.
How do the Mets keep themselves out of the Google search of “Mets collapses?” Play better than you did to close out your home season against a last-place team. After looking as soft as they have for more than half-a-baseball season, after to many moments when them having turned things around turned out to be a head fake, show in the late rounds of the regular season that they are different from those old, disposable Mets. And can take a punch. Maybe they could even come from behind in the 9th inning and win a game or two.
For the last time, you wonder what Steve Cohen is thinking and what he might do if a team on which he has spent $340 million doesn’t qualify for the postseason; if it can’t beat a Reds team whose payroll this season is a cool $220 million smaller than Cohen’s. Coming out of the weekend, the next closest team to the Mets in the wild card race was the Diamondbacks. They’re spending $180 million in a season in which they were sellers and not buyers at the trade deadline. You want more math? The combined payroll of the Reds and Diamondbacks still comes up about $40 million south of Cohen’s.
There is absolutely enough for the Mets to gather themselves, maybe even play themselves into a first-round series revenge series with the Dodgers. The $350 million Dodgers haven’t had the season everyone thought they’d have. But barring a final-week collapse, they’re still going to finish in first place. The Mets came out of last weekend 12 games out of first.
It’s the Phillies ahead of them. Again. It’s the Marlins waiting for them at the end of another regular season. All ancient history from ’07 and ‘08, of course. Unless the Mets repeat it. Unless these Mets are no better than those Mets.
